Improvement of Customer Satisfaction

The Yamaha Group conducts unique training programs aimed at fostering interest and sensitivity toward customer experiences. Through these programs, we train more than 3,000 employees a year. These programs see groups of employees thinking about how customers experience Yamaha Group products and services based on voice recordings of actual inquiries while interacting with the articles in question in order to gain an understanding of exactly how customers feel when using our products. Through the free exchange of opinions, participants become aware of customer sentiments that they could not have imagined on their own and think about what Yamaha Group employees can accomplish if they unite in their quest to serve customers. In this manner, these training programs help foster a corporate culture of valuing customer experiences.

In addition, monthly posters are displayed at domestic production bases providing feedback from customers around the world with regard to the products manufactured in Japan. Meanwhile, internal websites offer examples of improvements made to products and input from customers with regard to those products. This information helps improve employees’ sensitivity toward quality by making them aware of the discoveries their colleagues have made based on customer input and how they responded to this input.

Through these efforts, our aim is to foster a corporate culture that utilizes a customer-oriented approach and that is committed to earnest engagement with every customer.

The Yamaha Group has created an after-sales service management system for its musical instruments and audio equipment businesses and is working to continually improve the quality of its customer responses and support based on the slogan "ONE YAMAHA."

The Group policy is shared at the annual Service Management Meeting, and Japanese and overseas sales companies and manufacturing companies with service parts centers formulate targets and plans related to after-sales services. Group companies conduct activities according to their plans, and the quality assurance division of each business monitors their progress. In this way, the entire Group works to make improvements to continuously enhance responses to customers and customer support.

In fiscal 2023, the Service Management Meeting was held online using Microsoft Teams in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. At this meeting, customer service representatives from 26 Japanese and overseas companies discussed common issues needing to be addressed by customer service divisions across the Group. Such issued included the need to share information on customer service and support initiatives based on the changing social climate, to contribute to a recycling-oriented society, and to provide information on after-sales service techniques online. Furthermore, in order to provide standardized high-quality after-sales services to customers all over the world, the Yamaha Group established the Group After-Sales Service Policies & Rules, which outline the basic policies to be shared throughout the Group. The Group is also monitoring the implementation status of these policies via check sheets.

Yamaha Music Schools provide lessons that focus on fostering creativity based on the three features of comprehensive music education, timely education, and group lessons. Our aim is to empower children with the ability to express themselves freely with music through our unique education methods, which include elements such as listening, singing, playing, reading, and creating.

The first overseas Yamaha Music School opened its doors in Los Angeles in 1964. After this, we proceeded to expand our network to locations throughout Asia, Europe, North America, and Central and South America. As a result, we now provide opportunities to learn the joy of music to more than 140,000 students in over 40 countries and regions. Each course offered at these schools is developed with consideration given to the culture and character of the respective region while being based on a philosophy and curriculum for music education developed in Japan.

Furthermore, for more than five decades the Yamaha Group has been holding Yamaha Junior Original Concert events that call upon children under 15 years of age studying at Yamaha Music Schools to turn their feelings into music and perform their own compositions. Activities pertaining to Yamaha Junior Original Concert events are carried out in Japan and around the world. Through the common language of music, Yamaha’s philosophy of music education is spreading across the globe.

Yamaha Music Lessons for Adults are provided for a wide range of age groups in locations across Japan. With lessons for everyone from beginners looking to have fun while learning how to play an instrument to intermediate and advanced students dedicated to improving their skills, these lessons allow anyone to enjoy the process of learning and refining music techniques without undue stress. These lessons are provided for learners of all ages at roughly 1,200 site locations across Japan. We offer a variety of courses to match various customer needs, ranging from band courses, vocal and choir courses, wind and string instruments for those planning to play in groups, and keyboard courses for those looking to play alone. As of June 2022, we had a total of 39 courses. Solo lessons are available as well as small group lessons that allow students to improve their skills with an instrument while enjoying music with their friends through a curriculum that helps overcome any discrepancies in musical experience and original educational materials.

In addition, we offer "Music and Health" and "Sing for Health" wellness programs that capitalize on the health benefits of music.

The "Seishun Pops" course launched nationwide in 2017 is designed to allow even people with no musical background to have fun singing. This course mainly focuses on popular Japanese pop music or folk songs from the 1960s to 1980s that senior citizens enjoyed in their youth. Without using a score, participants can enjoy songs by singing in harmony or step to the music along with their peers while watching originally made videos.

Yamaha Corporation is developing and advocating its SoundUDTM collection of cloud technologies and platforms for supporting universal design in sound.

In 2017, the Yamaha Group established the SoundUD™ Consortium, an organization in which Yamaha Corporation is acting as the secretariat, with the objective of helping create a sustainable society in which there are no concerns about language or hearing ability. Yamaha Corporation is promoting the creation of innovation and new business models originating from Japan while helping facilitate the popularization of SoundUD™ technologies together with the more than 360 member companies and organizations (as of March 31, 2023). Efforts by the consortium to date have included the deployment of a multilanguage announcement system for use by senior citizens, people with disabilities who may have difficulty hearing announcements, as well as non-Japanese individuals who may not understand Japanese. This concept and the success of our activities have earned praise, resulting in the consortium being presented with a number of honors.

Another service of this nature is the Remote Cheerer powered by SoundUD™ remote cheering system developed by Yamaha. This system involves an app that helps users to engage with sports in an interactive manner, even when viewing from home or other remote locations. This service has been used at more than 500 events, including soccer, baseball, and basketball games, relaying over 100 million expressions of support from spectators. In 2022, this service won an award for excellence in the fourth Nihon Service Award, a program organized by Japan Productivity Center and SPRING for the purpose of recognizing innovative services. We have developed a commercial-use interphone service that can be used via smartphone. Named Intercom via your Smartphone, this service employs universal design principles, including the options for text communication via keyboard input and multilanguage support using machine translation, to ensure that it can be used with ease by anyone. A Gold Award was received for this service in the Interaction Design category of IAUD International Design Awards 2022.

Furthermore, awards were received in the 2022 Good Design Award program (organized by the Japan Institute of Design Promotion) for Intercom via your Smartphone powered by SoundUD™, an extension of the aforementioned interphone service, as well as for the Text and Sound Based Multilingual Announcement System powered by SoundUD™ commercial-use public announcement system developed jointly with USEN CORPORATION, which was also included in the GOOD DESIGN BEST 100 due to its particularly high evaluation.

Developed jointly by Yamaha Corporation and the COI Site of Tokyo University of the Arts, the Daredemo Piano (Auto-Accompanied Piano) allows anyone to produce exquisite performances as they can play a melody with just one finger while being supported by automatic accompaniment and pedal movement.

Yamaha Corporation has been involved in the COI Site of Tokyo University of the Arts, a facility that is part of the COI STREAM innovation creation program of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology and the Japan Science and Technology Agency, since October 2015. Our involvement has included the provision of technical support to this organization. The Daredemo Piano was born out of a project designed to fulfill the dream of a high school student with a disability affecting their hands and legs who sought to play Chopin’s Nocturnes. The key to fulfilling this dream was found in Yamaha’s Disklavier™ player piano and in its automatic accompaniment technology. Disklavier™ uses a system in which the notes played by one’s right hand, generally used for the melody, are instantly translated to MIDI data which is compared with the music database of our automatic playback system. This system then supplies the notes that would normally be played with the left hand, while matching the tempo of the performer. When combined with control over the pedal manipulation system installed in Disklavier™, this allows for performers to play songs exactly as they envision.

Looking ahead, Yamaha plans to take part in research on the Daredemo Piano in social welfare and medical fields with the goal of helping extend the amount of time in which people are able to live healthily. For example, the Daredemo Piano is expected to contribute to increased well-being for senior citizens and people with disabilities through the provision of ongoing happiness and meaningful activities. We also see applications for this innovation in teaching music to children and students and in providing education on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

In 2021, the Daredemo Piano won the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Award in the STI for SDGs program, which was established by the Japan Science and Technology Agency with the goal of honoring superior initiatives for resolving social issues through science, technology, and innovation (STI).

The COVID-19 pandemic is transforming the spaces in which we work and learn, giving rise to hybrid workstyles that merge office work and teleworking and HyFlex courses that combine face-to-face and online classes. The needs regarding in-office meeting rooms are also diversifying as companies seek to flexibly change layouts to maintain appropriate distance among participants, to more efficiently utilize meeting rooms based on the number of participants and the purpose of the meetings, and to make the sound environments of meeting rooms, which have traditionally been unsuited to remote meetings due to echoes, more ideal for such meetings.

Amid the resulting rise in remote meeting systems, the Yamaha Group has been turning its attention toward such office sound environment issues, leveraging its accumulated technical and product expertise to propose office sound environments that allow for conversations and remote meetings to be carried out without fear of being overheard or concern for noise from the surrounding area.

One offering used for this purpose is the ADECIA remote meeting sound solution launched in 2021. This audio system is a one-stop solution providing microphones and speakers that are optimized for the rooms in question, whether these rooms need to be used for remote meetings or classes. Our ADECIA system lineup includes the ADECIA Ceiling Solution, which is comprised of ceiling array microphones that allow for flexible adjustments to meeting room layouts and efficient meeting proceedings based on the number of participants; the ADECIA Tabletop Solution, which uses wired tabletop microphones to accommodate compact meetings with few participants; and the ADECIA Wireless Solution, an addition to our wireless microphone system lineup that supports optimal remote meetings during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. We are constantly expanding our lineup of ADECIA products to flexibly accommodate various remote meeting environments as these environments grow more diverse based on applications.

Ensuring that people around the world are able to continue to enjoy music throughout their life is an important social mission of a company involved in sound and music. Accordingly, the Yamaha Group will continue to advance business and product development activities aimed at creating new value at the intersection between enjoying quality sound and protecting one’s hearing.

A 2019 report by the World Health Organization indicates that around 1.1 billion people aged 12 to 35, or roughly half of this demographic, are at risk of hearing loss, and this number and the associated risks are only expected to increase if steps are not taken to curb this trend.

In order to help address this social issue, Yamaha provides its TW-E and EP-E series of earphones and YH-L and YH-E series of headphones, which are equipped with its proprietary Listening Care* technology for reducing the strain on listeners’ ears. We have also constructed the Thinking about Hearing Health website (in Japanese only), which supplies information on how to enjoy listening to music and other audio while caring for one’s hearing. Through these efforts, we hope to help ensure that people are able to continue to enjoy sound and music for as long as possible.

SYNCROOM is an online remote ensemble performance service that allows users in up to five locations to connect via the internet to enjoy remote ensembles.

Standard remote meeting and IP telephony systems are designed for conversations and meetings and thus entail a degree of audio latency that is unacceptable for ensemble performances, which require a high degree of synchronicity. SYNCROOM, meanwhile, uses a proprietary technology to minimize the latency resulted from two-way transmission of audio data via the internet to allow for satisfying ensemble performances to be performed without any sense of irregularity despite members being in remote locations. Moreover, this service can be used free of charge simply by installing the SYNCROOM app and creating an account. As of March 31, 2023, the number of account holders had risen to 200,000, indicating how SYNCROOM is helping users across Japan enjoy performances with colleagues separated by physical distance.

The SYNCROOM app was expanded in April 2022 with the addition of a new profile function that enables users to publicly display information such as self-introductions, their favorite music genres, the instruments in which they are interested, and their social media accounts. This profile function is combined with user search and favorite registry functions that make it easy to find users with similar interests and thereby facilitate connections between users.

SYNCROOM received the 2020 Nikkei Business Daily Award for Superiority in the Superior Products and Services category in January 2021.

• Official SYNCROOM website (in Japanese only)
• Official SYNCROOM players website (in Japanese only)

Distance Viewing is a next-generation live viewing service that records the full impact of live performances by artists and faithfully reproduces these performances in a virtual environment. Capitalizing on Yamaha’s musical instrument, audio equipment, and network insight and technologies, this service was developed with the aim of providing a means of mobilizing concert halls, which continue to face a challenging operating environment as a result of the prolongation of the COVID-19 pandemic. Distance Viewing can be used to reproduce performances in a virtual environment by combining faithful live performance audio with life-sized visuals displayed on large screens and lighting effects that mimic the actual performance.

Going forward, the Yamaha Group will continue to propose means of enjoying music that are suited to the new normal emerging amid the pandemic while delivering solutions that resolve social issues related to sound and music.

Distance Viewing received an award in the 2021 Good Design Award program organized by the Japan Institute of Design Promotion.